Tărtăria tablets
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The three Tărtăria tablets are probably amulets or votive tablets, which bear incised symbols that are claimed by some to be the earliest known form of writing in the world. The tablets are named after Tărtăria,Alba County, Transylvania, Romania, where they were found. The tablets may combine pictograms with abstract symbols.
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The finds
In 1961, near Tartaria, a small rural Transylvanian village of 5,000 inhabitants some kilometres from the well-known site of Turda, Nicolae Vlassa, an archaeologist at the Cluj Museum, unearthed three clay tablets, covered with strange signs, together with a small cache of offerings, accompanying the charred bones of a mature human, estimated to be 35-40 years old. The accompanying artefacts, pottery and alabaster figurines, suggest this person was a great priest or a shaman and that he was cremated during a sacrificial ritual.
Date
The figurines and pottery found with the tablets belonged to the Vinča culture, whose beginning was then set by Yugoslav and Romanian archaeologists at 2700BC. Vlassa interpreted the Tartaria tablets as a hunting scene and the other two with signs, as a kind of primitive writing similar to the early pictograms of the Sumerians. Similar artifacts have been found at Vinča, Serbia and a number of other locations in the southern Balkans. The discovery caused great interest in the archeological world as it predated the first Minoan writing, the oldest known writing in Europe.
However subsequent carbon dating on the Tartaria finds were to push the date of the tablets (and therefore of the whole Vinča culture) further back still - to before 4000BC. If the symbols are indeed a form of writing, then writing in the Danubian culture would predate the earliest Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics. They would thus be the earliest known writing in the world. This claim remains controversial.
Interpretation
Scholars who conclude that the inscribed symbols are writing base their assessment on a few conclusions, which are not universally endorsed. First, that similar signs on other artifacts of the Danube civilization, suggest that there was an inventory of precise standard shapes of which scribes made use. Second, the characters of this proto-European script, when compared to other archaic writings, manifest a high degree of standardization and a rectilinear shape. Third, that the information communicated by each character was a specific one with a unequivocal meaning. Finally, that the inscriptions are sequenced in rows, whether horizontal, vertical or circular.
Others consider the pictograms to be accompanied by random scribbles. Their meaning (if any) is unknown. If they do comprise a script, it is also not known what kind of writing system they represent. Some archaeologists who support the idea that they do represent writing have proposed that they are fragments of a system dubbed the Old European Script.